The Nazis Were on to Continental Drift Before Everyone Else

In the early 20th century, all these terms—and dozens of other equally colorful ones—were hurled at an emerging scientific idea that we’ve since come to accept as irrefutable and treat as common knowledge.

You may know it as the science of plate tectonics, the explanation of the mechanics of how the puzzle pieces that make up the earth’s surface move around and came to settle (somewhat) into the position they’re in today. In its infancy, though, the idea was known as continental drift, or continental displacement, and was widely regarded by geologists as BS.

Catch My Drift?

Continental drift was proposed by German scientist Alfred Wegener, an untenured and unsalaried lecturer at the University of Marburg. Geology was not his field—he specialized in meteorology and astronomy—but after he became fascinated with the apparent matching coastlines of the various continents while browsing through an atlas, he threw disciplinary boundaries to the wind and pursued his idea. What he proposed was that the continents had once all been joined together in a larger landmass he dubbed the Urkontinent, and was later called Pangaea (from the Greek pan- (“all”) and gaia (“earth”). At some point in time, the seams running along the supercontinent became unraveled and Pangaea broke into smaller pieces, which drifted, slowly but surely, into their current positions. As evidence, he pointed to live and fossil plants and animals on opposite sides of oceans that were the same or very similar, and geological formations that abruptly ended at the edge of one continent and picked up again on another’s shores.

Wegener first presented his theory of continental drift in a lecture to Frankfurt’s Geological Association in 1912, then in a journal article months later, and finally in a book published shortly after he returned from service in World War I. None of this received very much attention until the book was published in English, at which point Wegener was ridiculed by scientists in Britain, the United States, and even his own country. They poked holes in his evidence and his methods, picked at his credentials, and blasted him for not providing a plausible mechanism powerful enough to actually move the continents.

Wegener worked through the assault, addressing valid criticisms with additional evidence, correcting mistakes, and hypothesizing six different mechanisms for the continents’ drift in new editions of his work. Sadly, he died in 1930 on an expedition to Greenland, decades before his theory began to see widespread acceptance with the discovery of seafloor spreading, Wadati-Benioff zones, and other supporting data and evidence.

Friends in Weird Places

Not all the early reactions to continental drift were harsh, though. In the bizarre intellectual atmosphere of the Third Reich, Wegener’s theory had support and approval from an unlikely champion: the Nazi propaganda machine.

While Nazi science is largely remembered today for its more outrageous ideas and experiments, both real and apocryphal—flying saucers, secret Antarctic bases, talking dogs, supersoldiers, ancient Aryan ruins, and more—the Nazis did come down on the right side of continental drifting before most other geologists did.

Under the Nazis, Deutscher Verlag of Berlin published a bimonthly propaganda magazine called Signal. It was distributed throughout Germany, its allied nations and German-occupied areas in more than 20 languages. It featured war reports, essays on national socialist policies, German technology innovations, and drawings and photographs, all meant to praise the German government and its allies.

The first issue of 1941, mostly devoted to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, contained a peculiar piece of popular science writing: a two-page article on continental drift. In the piece, titled “And Yet They Do Move,” writer K. von Philippoff defended Wegener’s ideas, citing then-new data that showed an increasing distance between the American and European continents (and replicating one of Wegener’s own mistakes by placing too much emphasis on longitudinal measurements that were not accurate enough at the time to really demonstrate his conclusions) and reminding readers of Wegener’s other evidence, like the scattered flora and fauna and the fit of various continental coastlines. He concluded that continental drift provided a plausible and satisfactory answer to many geological and biological questions that couldn’t otherwise be explained and that “no mistake was possible” about the validity of Wegener’s theory.

While continental drift had a few supporters scattered here and there (like British geologist Arthur Holmes, whose own model of the mechanism for the movement of continents featured an early consideration of seafloor spreading), von Philippoff’s article is notable in that its presence in an official German propaganda magazine, reflecting the views of the government, implies approval and support by at least some members of the Nazi higher-ups. For all the horror and suffering they unleashed upon the world, history’s greatest villains were at least far ahead of their time in the field of geology.

The secret to sushi's delicious taste is invisible to the human eye. Chefs spend years training to properly prepare the Japanese culinary staple, which consists of fresh fish and seasoned rice, either served together or wrapped in seaweed. At its most elemental, as the American Chemistry Society's latest Reactions video explains below, the bite-sized morsels contain an assortment of compounds that, together, combine to form a perfectly balanced mix of savory and sweet. They include mannitol, iodine, and bromophenol, all of which provide a distinctive tang; and glutamate, which adds a savory, rich umami flavor (and turns into MSG when it's combined with a sodium ion).

Take a bite of science, and learn more fun facts about the Japanese culinary staple's long history and unique preparation method by watching the video below.

Lead author Karen Chin of the University of Colorado Boulder

Courtesy the University of Colorado Boulder

Scientists can learn a lot about the prehistoric world through very, very old poop. Just recently, researchers from the University of Colorado-Boulder and Kent State University studying fossilized dinosaur poop discovered that some herbivores weren't as picky about their diets as we thought. Though they mostly ate plants, large dinosaurs living in Utah 75 million years ago also seem to have eaten prehistoric crustaceans, as Nature News reports.

The new study, published in Scientific Reports, finds that large dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous period seem to have eaten crabs, along with rotting wood, based on the content of their coprolites (the more scientific term for prehistoric No. 2). The fossilized remains of dinos' bathroom activities were found in the Kaiparowits rock formation in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a known hotspot for pristine Late Cretaceous fossils.

"The large size and woody contents" of the poop suggest that they were created by dinosaurs that were well-equipped to process fiber in their diets, as the study puts it, leading the researchers to suggest that the poop came from big herbivores like hadrosaurs, whose remains have been found in the area before.

While scientists previously thought that plant-eating dinosaurs like hadrosaurs only ate vegetation, these findings suggest otherwise. "The diet represented by the Kaiparowits coprolites would have provided a woody stew of plant, fungal, and invertebrate tissues," the researchers write, including crabs (Yum.) These crustaceans would have provided a big source of calcium for the dinosaurs, and the other invertebrates that no doubt lived in the rotting logs would have provided a good source of protein.

But they probably didn't eat the rotting wood all year, instead munching on dead trees seasonally or during times when other food sources weren’t available. Another hypothesis is that these "ancient fecal producers," as the researchers call them, might have eaten the rotting wood, with its calcium-rich crustaceans and protein-laden invertebrates, during egg production, similar to the feeding patterns of modern birds during breeding season.

Regardless of the reason, these findings could change how we think about what big dinosaurs ate.